Architecture After Artificial Intelligence: Will Architecture Lose Its Soul?

At midnight an architect named Adam sits before a blank sheet, remembering his grandmother's house, the fig tree in its courtyard and the morning light on its wall, and types a short description into a machine that returns astonishing forms within moments; studying them, he asks which of them knew his grandmother. From that question the book weighs what artificial intelligence can and cannot do: it can draw a Damascene window and generate arches, yet it has never waited behind a window for someone's return or grown old inside a house. It places the new tools, Midjourney and open generative systems, within the long story of architecture as a record of humanity, from the pyramids, mosques and cathedrals to Le Corbusier's house as a machine for living, Frank Lloyd Wright's building born from its place, Gaudí's geometry that prayed and Zaha Hadid's freed line, warning that a style can be copied while a spirit cannot. An imagined city called Nova, planned entirely by data, turns out perfect and leaves its people unable to get lost or discover anything by chance, and the text argues that cities need some imperfection and that time itself is a building material. The architect it imagines becomes a conductor who lets the algorithm propose and keeps the ethical choice for himself, since the real danger is an architect who turns into a machine, and the book ends on the window a machine may draw while only a human knows what he longs for when looking through it.